Glossary
French: ancienneté
Seniority (ancienneté) is a mechanism specific to the European Union trademark system. It lets the owner of an EUTM who also holds an earlier identical national mark — for example a French registration at the INPI — record the earlier national date against the EU mark. The owner can then let the national registration lapse while being treated, in that country, as if it still held the older national right.
Seniority solves a housekeeping problem created by the unitary EU mark. A company that built its European portfolio one country at a time often ends up with a bundle of old national registrations plus a newer EUTM covering the same sign and goods. Renewing all of them is wasteful. Seniority lets the owner consolidate: claim the national marks’ dates in the EUTM, stop paying to renew the national registrations, and yet retain — country by country — the earlier priority those national marks conferred. If the EU mark ever falls, the preserved seniority can be reactivated as a national right.
To claim it, the earlier national mark and the EUTM must cover the same owner, the same sign, and the same goods and services (or the EUTM’s goods must be included in the national mark’s).
There is no US equivalent, and that is exactly why it is worth flagging for US counsel. The US has a single federal register; there is no layer of separate national registrations to consolidate, and nothing like carrying an earlier registration’s date into a different registration while abandoning the first. Seniority is a creature of the EU’s two-tier (national + EU-wide) structure, and it has no analog in a one-register system.
Seniority (ancienneté) is routinely confused with priority (priorité), and they are different animals:
One looks forward from a fresh filing; the other looks backward to preserve an old right.
A US company registered its brand nationally in France, Germany and Italy over the 2000s, then filed a single EUTM in the 2010s. Rather than keep renewing three national marks alongside the EUTM, it claims the seniority of each national registration in the EU mark and lets the national ones lapse — keeping, in France, Germany and Italy, the benefit of its original earlier dates.
Seniority is a core lever of European portfolio management and renewal, and it interacts with the conversion and consolidation choices around EU trademark registration. See also European Union trademark and priority right.